Daily Photo – Chicago Skyscrapers & Edwardian Elegances

In December 1909, when the first tenants moved into the New Zealand Express Company Building (now Consultancy House) in Dunedin, what excitement there must have been. People stopped in the street, craned their necks skyward, and gasped in awe at the imposing edifice stretching up towards the clouds. It was unlike anything the city had seen before. Here was an amalgam of Chicago skyscraper and Edwardian elegance at its very finest, seven storeys of groundbreaking architectural wonder.

The soaring colossus that had risen from the ground in Dunedin’s Bond Street in a little over two years was a triumph of modern engineering. To create such a towering structure took around 400 tonnes of steel, over 500,000 bricks, and approximately 1,000 cubic feet of Oamaru stone. Add to that the kauri and rimu timber for floors and doors, the pressed-metal ceilings imported from the United States, and the marble stairs and tiled entryways, and it’s easy to see why Dunedin was proud. It was the tallest building in the Southern Hemisphere, its view said to be unsurpassed anywhere else in the city, and its form of construction, as one newspaper noted, “had so far not yet been adopted anyway in the colonies.” This was one impressive building! Even more remarkable was the staggered occupation that took place upon opening, uncommon at the time, especially for large commercial buildings such as this. When the first tenants moved in towards the end of 1909, five of the seven storeys were complete, while work continued on the upper floors until final completion in 1910.

I mention this because the other day I happened to be near Consultancy House, not far from a new building recently opened in a style I like to call pointy and angular, a perfect example of what happens when architects are given a ruler, a lot of money, and far too much confidence. It looks like someone wrapped an office block in a giant, golden Venetian blind. No doubt it’ll take a team of highly paid specialists to fix it the moment a bird so much as sneezes on it. It’s not that I dislike the new four-storey, $45 million ACC Ōtepoti development, it’s just that I much prefer a little grand Victorian or Edwardian elegance, with an ornate façade in my buildings.